My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Wiki:Style guide

The purpose of this style guide is to homogenize the spelling, linking and appearance of pages throughout the wiki, and set standards for clear and accurate writing. Discuss modifying and adding style guidelines in the forum. Where the style guide is lacking, please refer to the Wikipedia Manual of Style. For a how-to style article, see Help:Style guide.

Lead section

The first paragraph should define the topic without being overly specific. It should establish the context in which the topic is being considered and the boundaries of the topic; for example, the lead for the article list of ponies succinctly states the limits of that list.

The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article. Avoid lengthy paragraphs and over-specific descriptions, since greater detail is saved for the body of the article.

If the lead section includes an {{infobox}} template or a similar template, the double curly braces – }} – at the end of the template's syntax should be placed on the last line with the following words, and the text of the lead section should follow in a new line after them.

Trivia

Avoid creating lists of miscellaneous information. These lists, often placed in a "trivia" section, should in most cases be considered temporary until a better method of presentation can be determined.

Editorializing

The main body of the article should not be editorialized.

Image captions may be humorously editorialized.

Formatting

Article titles

The title of an article should correspond to the name or title of the subject of the article as it appears on the show, preferably as it appears on the credits, or as it appears consistently in recent first-party merchandise or promotional materials.

Otherwise, the article title should follow an unambiguous use of the name or title on the show.

Otherwise, the article title should follow a name or title as used by Hasbro, as used by the crew, as used most frequently by reliable sources, as voted per the placeholder name policy, or as specified by Wikipedia's guidelines, in that order.

Images

Image syntax for images displayed next to text paragraphs should be at the start of the paragraph's line of text.

Galleries

Images linking to galleries from the main article should be 300px wide.

When a character's season gallery is split, the pages should be titled "/Season X episodes Y-Z" (with an unspaced hyphen) and the displayed title should be "Season X, episodes Y–Z" (with the season number spelled out and the episode numbers in numerals). Note that the dash is an en dash per Wikipedia:MOS:ENDASH.

Videos

Please avoid linking or embedding external videos.

Articles about songs may embed external videos of the song.

International versions of videos should be labeled by language, with region in parentheses if applicable.

Capitalization

Use sentence case in titles and headlines: capitalize only the first word, proper nouns, and as dictated by other specific English rules.

Punctuation

Subtitles and image descriptions should have either no punctuation or proper punctuation.

Asides in parentheses are generally indicative of bad structure and should be avoided.

Titles

Titles of episodes and animated shorts should be written without quotation marks and not italicized.

Titles of songs should be written in quotation marks and not italicized, with the exception of when they are listed on the tables on Songs, in which case they should be written without quotation marks and not italicized.

Quotes

Long quotes should be indented, with character names in bold and separated from the spoken dialogue with a colon. Emphasis should be in italics, and stage directions should be sparse and in brackets.

Example:

Character: Dialogue, emphasized dialogue.

[stage directions]

Fluttershy: [very softly] Yay.

Short quotes should use {{quote}} and be placed in the appropriate section or in the quotes section.

Songs

Sung lyrics should be indented and set in a regular font. Spoken lyrics should have the name of the speaking character precede them non-indented and in bold type. If the vocalist needs to be named, their name should be set inside square brackets before their segment.

In order to qualify for appearance tables using these templates, a character should have at least 4 appearances in the series.

Mostly-full or wordy appearance tables should use the standard two-column (episode|description) tables. For example see Lyra Heartstrings. The two-column tables can be used in combination with less-wordy appearance table templates.

Spelling

Spelling of titles and names should adhere to the way they appear on the show or in material by Hasbro. Terms that do not appear on the show should adhere to American English spelling and to a manual of style, preferably the Wikipedia Manual of Style.